Portable wireless devices such as smart phones have small screen sizes relative to personal computers. They also have the ability to connect to the internet to receive digital content from the web servers. However the digital content in the servers is formatted to be displayed on the larger screen size of personal computers. Therefore, digital information that is received from a web server on the global network for display on a screen of these devices does not fit their limited screen sizes.
The industry solutions have been to provide zooming in on the content at selected places and then using vertical and horizontal scrolling to scroll information up/down and sideways on the device to be able to read the digital content on these small screen sizes. For example, for smaller screen sizes, as in smart phones such as the I-phone, in addition to scrolling, the solution has also been to include zooming in on the information.
Some servers store pages that are designed for small screens for the smart phones. Such servers are few and also the server does not know in advance the screen size of the receiving device. Screens of hand held devices are getting smaller and a variety of screen sizes are available.
Further, information is stored in remote servers on the Internet and the server does not know the size of the screen of the device accessing the Information. The web server sending interface does not query the size of the screen of the device receiving the content and does not format the information for the screen size. And further more, the device does not send the size of the screen in advance to the server.
Therefore some servers, identified by domain names, are set up to respond to smart phones only and have provided miniature pages for them. However the size of the screen is likely to vary quite a bit with the advent of new smart phones from different manufacturers.
Hence new ways to display digital content significantly exceeding the size of the screen is required without the server knowing the screen size of the content-requesting-device and reformatting the content for each device.
Hence it is the objective of the embodiments herein to be able to format digital content for display on small screen sizes where the content exceeds the size of the screen. It is further the objective to provide for an improved navigation of the digital content on the small screen sizes.